


Triptych

by Meduseld



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Dreams, Friends to Lovers, Growing Up, M/M, Pining, Some self hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-19
Updated: 2017-06-19
Packaged: 2018-11-16 06:29:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11248218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meduseld/pseuds/Meduseld
Summary: Caleb, in dreams and thirds.





	Triptych

-one-

Caleb Brewster is dreaming, and he is happy. 

The dream is not very different from reality, happening in the warm barn loft where he sleeps in early autumn. 

There is the folded blanket his mother made, and the clear moonlight streaming through. 

But they are both softer than in the real world, and gone are the earth smells and animal sounds. In the dream world, beside him and above him and below him, pressed skin to skin to skin, is his best friend. 

It’s not strange. 

Dreams never are. 

Caleb, waking Caleb, know what Ben looks like under his clothes, shed when they go swimming or climbing or it’s just too hot to bear them. It’s not strange. 

He’s seen others, Abe and Sam and even Selah Strong, and they’ve seen him. 

But his sleeping mind can take the memories he hasn’t realized he owns of fleeting glimpses and indirect gazes and paint perfect expanses of pale skin against his.  

Somewhere inside him the animal part tenses. 

The dream is dangerous. 

It’s enough for him to know that he’s dreaming. And that it’s too late. 

The dream shifts around him, and the mirage of it, warm skin on his and breath that isn’t _real_ on his chest, makes his blood burn. He wakes up with half a noise in his throat and his breeches achingly tight. 

Caleb doesn’t do anything about it. 

Or the next night. 

Or the three that come after, leaving ghostly images on his eyelids of Ben, who asks him every morning if he’s been sleeping at all. 

He gives in after that. 

When he’s finished, too, too quickly in the cold air of real fall, he feels empty. 

 

-two-

Caleb feels they’ll never really go away, the dreams. 

They all get older, and he manages to pull the struggling fluff on his cheeks into something like a beard. 

Ben holds back tears as he hugs them goodbye, on his way to Yale and a greater world. He’s careful not to hold on for too long. 

Abe starts traveling to the city, more and more until he comes back with his brother in a box beside him. 

Caleb attends Anna’s wedding to Selah Strong, and toasts their health in Strong Tavern. Her eyes don’t smile once. 

Part of him wants to offer her his horse, headed everywhere that’s away.

 Another wants to scream at her until he’s hoarse. At least they got to _try_. 

He boards ships instead. 

Somewhere in the middle, he finds himself in New Haven. 

He sees Ben and he _knows_. Whatever thing is twisted in him, it won’t ever be set right. 

 _God help us_ , he thinks, and doesn’t know who he means. 

Caleb doesn’t stay long and he doesn’t take the offered room at Ben’s lodgings. He picks the worst public house he can find and lets the barmaid ply him with enough ale that he takes her upstairs. 

It’s over too quickly, and its half shame and half relief that makes him hide his face against her thigh. She strokes his hair for what feels like a long time. Her voice follows him for days. 

It’s a comfort. 

He’ll forget her until he doesn’t, in the face of Anna’s anger, but that comes later. 

The war comes first. 

 

-three-

Caleb can feel the change in the air, in the water, in the dirt, like anyone else. 

He knows that students are eager for it, and when Sam Tallmadge tells him Ben’s dressing in blue and gold, the words as inevitable as the sun rising, he signs up that very day. 

There’s nowhere to go. Not anymore.

Its months before they find each other, in some tiny camp. 

Ben is tired and mud streaked. The day before his dragoons had scored some minor victory, and when they’d ridden into camp Ben’s eyes were closed. 

The constellations of freckles on his eyelids are the first map Caleb ever read. 

He can’t sleep that night, staring at the rough canvas above him, listening to the whistling snores of men beside him. 

When he glimpses Ben, framed in the doorway and beckoning, he thinks he’s started dreaming. 

But he can still hear the others, and Ben’s never far from him in sleep. He goes.

The world is green and silver and still and they walk in silence. 

Ben’s fingers close on his and he sighs. His breath is cloudy and folds into Ben’s like their hands do. 

All those years and words he’d planned and rejected, kept locked behind his teeth and carved into his bones, disappear into the mist. 

It’s like coming up for air after too long under dark water.  Like coming to a clearing in the woods and realizing you weren’t lost, you’d been on the path from the start and it lead home.

When their lips meet he knows Ben’s taste. 

He thinks he always has.


End file.
